Adventures with Tamron : Pebble Beach

By Jillian Bell

With all of my postings, a common thread involves searching for inspiration. Another personal goal I find is to photograph ordinary objects in a new and creative way. The examples in this blog are great examples of these two concepts. In honor of our first real snowfall in Minnesota, I found inspiration in the color white. Often if I'm stuck, or feeling uninspired, I'll simplify an idea into a word, or concept (i.e. white, or lines, or macro, or night photography). Then I can focus on how to get the best photographs that portray that idea. I also chose to focus on macro photography because I haven't played with my Tamron SP 90mm F2.8 Macro in some time. If you can't tell by now, these photographs are not photos of Pebble Beach, CA. Although I have a trip in January to California that I'm looking forward to. To start, I looked around for things that are white and found some coconut M&Ms at the grocery store. Flipping them all over gave me a repetitive shape to fill the frame. The candies also had these delightful palm trees and umbrellas that I did not expect. This is where the name "Pebble Beach" came from. The palm trees and round repetitive shapes reminded me of a rocky beach. Each of these three photographs take the same scene, working with composition to achieve three different photographs. When photographing white objects, all cameras will meter to a neutral grey. It is important to over expose slightly, giving the white values their full brightness. The exposure for these three shots are ISO 800, F11 @ 1/40th of a second. With an exposure compensation of +0.07. Using a higher ISO allowed me to handhold these images, if I were to try it again, I would prefer to shoot at ISO 100 for better detail, while using a tripod. In the last photograph, I drew in my beach bum for an added bit of whimsey. A sunny scene while I'm inside drinking my hot cocoa. Thank you for reading, and as always, keep your eyes open for inspiration.

Comments

[James Gordon Patterson]

I have several Tamron lenses: 200-500mm, 70-200mm, 18-270mm.

http://JamesGordonPatterson.com

[Danny]

Nice images, they definitely look like pebbles!

[Jillian Bell]

Thank you - all I did was turn most of them around. I find it amazing how ordinary objects can look completely different based on simple manipulation.